I have a story to tell and a question to ask.
I have been using xLights for only a few years. I have used it mainly for making short animation-only displays for most holidays of the year. This has necessitated a large number of models that I use only for one sequence. A leprechaun for St. Patrick's Day for instance. I am using a set of up to 20 EspPixelsticks to display the show along with 2 remote RPi0's running Pi Hat Pixels Strings. How I managed it was I would assign each model for a particular holiday to a particular controller, and assign universe numbers accordingly for each model. This worked fine for several years. Not really using channel numbers but using universe numbers to define everything. I would reuse the controllers simply by assigning different models to them and sometimes changing universe numbers. I didn't know, and still don't know how models actually work within xLights. What I found was that I had a large number of unused models in the preview. I would unselect the "Active" option in the model properties for unused models and they would no longer display in the preview. Unused models were not assigned to controllers or the controllers were deactivated for the unused models. I had a neon-flex heart for Valentines Day for instance that was a custom model only used around that time of year.
For Halloween this year I started having problems, and things weren't playing right on several models on the actual display and there were model overlaps of channels that I didn't know how to fix. I ended up deleting all of the unused models to make it work.
Now for Christmas, I want to use the models that I had made for Christmas last year, but deleted at Halloween. I don't understand how models are saved. I tried opening the Christmas xml file from last year and it says the models are not there and asks to reassign them to existing models, which are the few that I used for Halloween.
So I also tried to open a file from the Backup folder, and still had the same problem, no Christmas models.
It seems when you open xLights, the models are already there before you open a sequence, where are the models saved?
Can I get the models back that I deleted?
I made a 2nd show folder, as I learned I should have been making individual show folders for each holiday show that had different models.
I would like to know is there somewhere that explains what all the xLight files and file types are? Specifically:
.fseq
.xml
.xsq
.xbkp
I'd really like to get my Christmas models back for this year as there were multiple custom models I spent weeks making.
